OTR Interviews

Bachmann: I don't care what the Supreme Court does, Congress must repeal 'ObamaCare'

This is a rush transcript from "On the Record," March 26, 2012. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. MICHELE BACHMANN, FORMER GOP PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: The American people expect no less. They want this bill repealed. And we're standing here today to say American people, the president of the United States down the street at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue may not be listening to you, but we in Congress have not forgotten you. We're listening. We're not giving up until we full square repeal this bill.

VAN SUSTEREN: That was within seconds of when the national health care law was passed, wasn't it?

BACHMANN: Actually, this is just recently, this last one.

VAN SUSTEREN: But right after the president, right after it was signed, you introduced one.

BACHMANN: I did. Actually, the night that the bill was passed on the house floor, I turned to one of my colleagues, Mike Pence, and I said, Mike, we've got to do something. We've got to enter a repeal bill. And he said Michele, have at it. My staff and I wrote the repeal bill that night. And the next morning I was the first member of Congress on the floor. I introduced the full-scale repeal bill because I thought it was imperative that we let the American people know we are not waving the white flag of surrender on socialized medicine. We're going to keep fighting until it's repealed. And we will. We're not giving up.

VAN SUSTEREN: What was the vote on that, by the way, do you remember?

BACHMANN: We got killed. It was more than enough. That's when Nancy Pelosi ran the House of Representatives, Harry Reid ran the Senate, and Barack Obama was president. So the Democrats had their way. They got their Bill, and the American people hate it. They want us to get rid of it because they see that costs are going through the roof. It's the number one reasons employers aren't hiring today. And it will change us forever. So people want us to repeal with it and deal with the true problem with health care which is cost. This bill only increased the cost of health care. What we want to do as House Republicans is actually bring down the cost. The good news is we can. There's a positive solutions.

VAN SUSTEREN: I made a list of some things. One of the things is cost would go down and 30 million who were uninsured would have health insurance. Right now those 30 million don't have health insurance because we haven't gotten to the mandate, right?

BACHMANN: They don't have it. But even worse, the government through the budget office said at least 20 million people are going to lose their health care because employers are going to drop them because the costs are escalating so fast on health care employers are going to let them go. So you can't win for losing on this bill.

VAN SUSTEREN: What would you do? I mean, under your thought, would everybody have some sort of health insurance, it would just be a different program?

BACHMANN: This is what I think we need to do. Adopt free market principles. I put a bill together a couple of years ago that says, number one, let any American buy any health insurance policy they want anywhere in the United States.

VAN SUSTEREN: We can't now?

BACHMANN: You can't. You can only buy a health insurance policy in your state written under your state mandate.

VAN SUSTEREN: How come?

BACHMANN: Well, because there's a thing call the McCarron-Ferguson law at the federal level, and it creates monopolies for insurance companies in every single state. We've got to knock down those barriers and really think about the consumer and let the consumer buy any insurance policy they want anywhere in America, no minimum federal requirements.

VAN SUSTEREN: Let me ask you this. So the insurance companies are making out like bandits because of this monopoly?

BACHMANN: They've got a monopoly in each state. What does that tell you?

(CROSSTALK)

BACHMANN: Number two, we should let every American pay for their health insurance expenses, whether it's their premiums, their copays, deductibles, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, they should be able to pay for it with their own tax free money.

Number three, we need have lawsuit abuse reform. If you do those three things, you'll drive down the costs dramatically, and that's the real problem, because President Obama promised every household they'd save $2,500 a year. Instead we've seen the costs spike through the roof. And that's why this is so wildly unpopular. I'm going to be in the Supreme Court to hear the oral arguments. I have a ticket. I'm going to be there to listen to it.

VAN SUSTEREN: I'll tell you what I find very troubling. This 2,500 pages, and Leader Pelosi famously said something, we have to pass it -- I think she meant so people to read it and see it. The man who argued today in the Supreme Court made some sort of sarcastic remark about how it didn't have a lot of clarity. I thought that was an understatement.

(LAUGHTER)

VAN SUSTEREN: The bill is incomprehensible. Those 2,500 pages were then shipped over to HHS and then unelected people then created these rules. All these unelected people are really writing the health care.

BACHMANN: This is a bill that will never finish being written. That's why it's so terrible. The 2,500 pages is chump change. There's already been over 10,000 pages of regulations that are written, are there's 1,200 places in the bill --

(CROSSTALK)

BACHMANN: I remember the night you brought it in here. That's just the bill. And then take that times a factor of 10, and that's the beginning of the regulations. It will never end, and employers will never know if they're a criminal or not a criminal, if they're in compliance or not. And individuals will never know if they're in compliance or not. It will change us forever. It changes us forever as a people, as a country, our relationship with government. It changes us forever because we aren't electing a president in the future. We're electing a health care dictator who with the stroke of a pen or with the waving of his magic wand decides what we get to do or what we don't. And the true story of health care under ObamaCare is not the goodies you get. It's what's government is going to take away. That's the future of ObamaCare. We all lose.

VAN SUSTEREN: The whole insanity is not one member of Congress could read it or did read it before voting on it. I tried reading it. It was absolutely incomprehensible.

BACHMANN: They didn't read it before the vote on it because in the Senate they didn't get it for three hours before they voted on it.

VAN SUSTEREN: I tried to read it. The thing made absolutely no sense, terribly written.

BACHMANN: The one thing that people didn't know is it contained $105 billion, 464 million to implement the bill. Can you imagine members of Congress voted for a bill that spent $105 billion and they didn't even know that that money was in there. Bizarre.

(CROSSTALK)

BACHMANN: Everybody should be outraged and demand that this get repealed. I don't care what the Supreme Court does, congress has to repeal this bill. That's the bottom line.